Author: Ellen Bell

In my dream the words were in a crossword puzzle. They were the answer, and written downwards. And all through my dream I was trying to make myself remember them.

It’s funny, it was a term that my mother would use. I’ve never heard anyone else say it. Have you got your gum boots? she’d ask, not wellingtons or wellies. And more often than not the words or phrases that she’d favour made them less palatable to me. I’m sorry for that now. Gum boots seemed to speak of the flappy, floppy-ness of them. Maybe it was the way she’d say such things, in a rather accusatory way, and sharply. I could not like them afterwards. I wish I’d been kinder, warmer inside towards her. She made my nerves jangle. It wasn’t her fault. We didn’t suit her and I. Forgive me.

The noise I heard yesterday while working in my sketchbook was a tree-feeler. We saw him blowing sawdust off the cars on St David’s Road when we came down the hill from our walk (such a lovely walk, he reminisced as we sat in the sun by the National Library). The trees have been cut down hard, pollarded like trees that van Gogh drew in Arles. They look like fists punching at the sky. I will draw them later.

How I shall miss this moon, the snow moon, when it leaves. I walk in white along the Perygyl as if in a dream.

I woke just before my alarm from a dream in which he and I (I think it was him though in my dream the man was taller, almost as tall as Justin Edwards) and another being (I think it was another part of me – a doppelganger perhaps) were in a lift. It wasn’t a conventional lift though, it was more like a cubicle with a half curtain, like they have in swimming baths. The floor was tiled and we were bare-footed. We were trying to get the lift to go up. It juddered but every time he stepped out of it to press the button it shook and stopped.

There is a sock on the road along St David’s Road. It has been there for a few days now. Someone has driven over it for it has been pressed hard into the tarmac. I saw a glove down towards the Prom which had had the same fate.

I woke from a dream about shoes, though the detail has since been lost. He was in there, but whether the shoes were mine or his I cannot tell. His friend emailed him to say thank you for the video we made for his 75th. In his email he talked of the 5 happiest times of his life – he was in a few, I think. Maybe 2. I thought about the times I’ve been happiest as I mopped and hoovered the flat. It’s a tough one. They are not distinct moments as such but periods of time, mostly on holiday and sometimes on my own. They are mostly of the latter years. And times when my fretting was less. Times in the sun mostly. I miss it, that heat. It makes everything clearer.

I would’ve meant more if he’d got my name right.

I’m a doer of small things, a maker of small differences in other people’s lives. As a young woman, I’d hoped to change things, to make great strides and influence people. I’ve narrowed my expectations since then. I cannot do much. I’m a small person with small vistas. But I can try to be kind and to express appreciation when I feel it. Like yesterday. (He replied by the way, I wasn’t expecting it.)

I woke from unsettling dreams of love affairs I didn’t want and visiting her house. She doesn’t know me but I thought she’d recognise me anyway if I knocked on her window. Her house wasn’t what I expected and once it seemed to stretch on and on. People are not who we think they are. And that is good, isn’t it, in the main?

The cloud hangs heavy. No sun today. So be it.

It was such a shock and the way that she relayed the news was odd too. I won’t write it here, her anonymity is precious to me. But I’m glad. Glad for all of them. This is not the narrative I had written for them in my head, it is better. There is freedom here, a breaking out. I wish them all well. A new life. May it bring joy.

I drew the trees. They are marvellous. They are Hydra, fists, disgorged limbs pushing up to the sky. I have not done them justice but I will keep trying. Always.

I sew in the afternoons and listen to Classic FM as I do so. During the requests yesterday a woman called in saying that as a recently retired midwife she was in her kitchen making a Manchester Tart for the first time, as it reminded her of her school days. I’ve no idea what a Manchester Tart is, though I spent much of my youth living there. She talked about not knowing what to do with all the left over egg whites, so perhaps it’s a kind of custard tart. I love the cosiness of hearing their voices and pleas for certain pieces of music, though the constant breaking for adverts is a nuisance (I switch over to Heart 70s for a few minutes for a sing-a-long).

I’m making a drawing a day. I try to do too much and often feel that I don’t give enough of myself to each separate thing, but heigh-ho. And I’m learning to look again. I can feel it when my concentration ebbs. I drew small things. Today I will have another go at the pollarded trees, if it stays fine. But this morning I am to read (well research really, for my short story, I have set the bar high. Good thing or bad?).

There was another lorry at the harbour this morning. All its lights were off. Falfish was emblazoned on its side. From Falmouth no doubt. All the way from Cornwall. Isn’t it a bit like taking coals to Newcastle? Or perhaps not these days with all the coalmines now defunct. But what fish can we have here that they don’t have there?

The harbour is all neat and tidy, well as neat and tidy as a working harbour can be. All the lobster pots have been stacked and are contained behind wire barriers. The ropes have been coiled and the nets packed away. I like the order of it. Though won’t the season begin again soon? There was a refrigerated lorry waiting for something as I walked by. What fish would that be then? I know nothing of these things – herring, mackerel? There was a mist as I walked. It felt more like autumn than spring. A large man or woman, I couldn’t tell in the gloom. sat on a bench looking at the sea.

Two large carcasses of trees lie South beach, one is completely hollowed out like a canoe.

There were several painters’ vans outside a house on the road where I stood drawing the cut trees yesterday afternoon. From the house I could hear one of the decorators singing Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. Across the road a woman stood in the shade smoking and texting on her phone. The sun shone. I took off my hat and gloves to draw. Earlier I’d sat on a bench outside the Nat Lib and closing my eyes in the sun I’d listened to the drones on the heather by my feet. There had been 6 magpies in the field as I’d walked up.

I heard a scuffling sound from under a parked van on St David’s Road as I walked home from drawing the trees (they were like fists or hydra). I thought it was an injured bird and bent down to see what I could do. But there were two of them, brown and dusty, and they were fighting. I told them to stop and then, realising my stupidity, left them to it.

I dreamt I had a new job and that it was my first day. I made to walk up some narrow stairs to find my office or my boss but was stopped by a secretary who told me to take a seat in a kind of atrium. Was it a teaching establishment, for I saw a line of Japanese students queuing at a canteen? She offered me a coffee and I hesitated – was it real coffee, was it decaff, what about the milk? Then I woke to my alarm with the sentence -‘it’s all anti-Danish’ in my head.

All my sisters were there in my dream. We were organising the cleaning of a house together. My youngest sister was in charge (so perhaps we weren’t all there). I’d suggested something by way of a solution and she’d been impressed and I was pleased (something to do with her car and taking a taxi because she had to leave it, all very prosaic). We were opening out bin bags and I had a packet of love hearts in my hand. I remembered, in my dream, how I’d loved them as a child. (Anything with words it seems did it for me, as it still does, I wonder why?) We’d begun stripping the outer covering off the sweets revealing a grey plastic bag and my alarm went off.

Why is the National Library lit up in red?

The moon was shining directly on the ex-butcher’s house. It was stunning.

A new month. My drawing month. And I have no idea what I’m going to do.

I’m still a little out of sorts. I am fighting myself. Let it be, he says. I’m not sure if the month thing will work. I didn’t know what I was going to write last month but a story began to evolve and now it has taken over my head. Though I’ve a lot more to research before it can really take shape. What will come of March? I intend to just sit at my desk with my sketchbook and see what happens. I’m tempted to work in silence – with just the birds song outside for company. We’ll see.